Mme. de Bargeton’s rooms were crowded that evening with friends who came to remonstrate with her.  She brought her most caustic wit into play.  She said that as noble families could not produce a Moliere, a Racine, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their fathers.  She said that genius was always noble.  She railed at boorish squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly.  In short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her eccentricity.  And in these ways she conjured away the storm with her heavy artillery.

When Lucien, obedient to her request, appeared for the first time in the faded great drawing-room, where the whist-tables were set out, she welcomed him graciously, and brought him forward, like a queen who means to be obeyed.  She addressed the controller of excise as “M.  Chatelet,” and left that gentleman thunderstruck by the discovery that she knew about the illegal superfetation of the particle.  Lucien was forced upon her circle, and was received as a poisonous element, which every person in it vowed to expel with the antidote of insolence.

Nais had won a victory, but she had lost her supremacy of empire.  There was a rumor of insurrection.  Amelie, otherwise Mme. de Chandour, harkening to “M.  Chatelet’s” counsels, determined to erect a rival altar by receiving on Wednesdays.  Now Mme. de Bargeton’s salon was open every evening; and those who frequented it were so wedded to their ways, so accustomed to meet about the same tables, to play the familiar game of backgammon, to see the same faces and the same candle sconces night after night; and afterwards to cloak and shawl, and put on overshoes and hats in the old corridor, that they were quite as much attached to the steps of the staircase as to the mistress of the house.

“All resigned themselves to endure the songster” (chardonneret) “of the sacred grove,” said Alexandre de Brebian, which was witticism number two.  Finally, the president of the agricultural society put an end to the sedition by remarking judicially that “before the Revolution the greatest nobles admitted men like Dulcos and Grimm and Crebillon to their society—­men who were nobodies, like this little poet of L’Houmeau; but one thing they never did, they never received tax-collectors, and, after all, Chatelet is only a tax-collector.”

Du Chatelet suffered for Chardon.  Every one turned the cold shoulder upon him; and Chatelet was conscious that he was attacked.  When Mme. de Bargeton called him “M.  Chatelet,” he swore to himself that he would possess her; and now he entered into the views of the mistress of the house, came to the support of the young poet, and declared himself Lucien’s friend.  The great diplomatist,